Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe are not the same person.

The former passed away in 1938, while the latter is still alive. There is sometimes confusion regarding their names.

Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward, Angel at a relatively young age. Once you struggle through this imposing volume, it's almost难以置信. It's a highly fictionalized account of Wolfe's own life, told through the character of Eugene Gant from his birth until just before his twentieth year. The family dynamic is indeed complex, with an extremely overbearing father (who is also an alcoholic) and several young Gants having equal love/hate relationships with both their father and mother. As I mentioned, it's complicated.

I enjoy coming-of-age stories as much as anyone else, but what Wolfe does here is something more. It's a huge book that shouldn't be read lightly. And for such a young writer, I'm both impressed and annoyed by the way he wrote the story. I now have a list of vocabulary words that I need to look up, which is really rather unnecessary and very self-indulgent.

In any case, I feel like I've overcome some sort of obstacle by finally managing to finish this book. And I'm glad to have kept my promise to Wolfe's grave in North Carolina (made several years ago) that I would eventually read this hefty book. It's worth a read if you have the time and patience, if for no other reason than it is likely the first time the term "poon tang" appeared in print. I could be wrong about that, but I've never come across it before reading this book, which was published in 1929. Well done, Mr. Wolfe.

**Look Homeward, Angel: A Reflection on a Timeless Novel**

Look Homeward, Angel, a story of buried life, holds a special place in the annals of American literature. Thomas Wolfe's masterpiece, initially titled O Lost, was transformed by the master editor Maxwell Perkins. Perkins, already renowned for his work with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, recognized the potential in Wolfe's manuscript. He cut sixty-six thousand words to emphasize the central focus of Eugene Gant.

The novel, published in 1929, just before the stock market crash, became a literary sensation. Wolfe's autobiographical fiction vividly portrays the complex relationships within the Gant family. Eugene's father, a stone cutter, and his mother, a boarding house owner, have conflicting belief systems that shape Eugene's life. The novel takes us through Eugene's adolescence, his experiences during WWI, and his search for love and identity.
I first read Look Homeward, Angel in 1973, at the age of twenty-one. I was immediately entranced by Wolfe's writing and felt a kinship with Eugene. However, upon re-reading the novel nearly forty-one years later, my perspective had changed. The passage of time had taken the gloss off the novel for me. I now believe that it is best left to the younger reader.
Despite my changing feelings, I still recognize the significance of Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe's ability to paint a vivid picture of a place and time, and his memorable characters, make this novel a classic. It also serves as a reminder of the importance of family, love, and identity. As I look back on my own life, I realize that I have learned something from each day of living. And like Wolfe, I have come to terms with the fact that life is not always as we imagine it to be.

In conclusion, Look Homeward, Angel is a novel that will continue to be read and studied for generations to come. It is a testament to Thomas Wolfe's talent as a writer and his ability to capture the human experience. Whether you are a young reader just discovering the joys of literature or an older reader looking back on a lifetime of reading, this novel is sure to touch your heart and make you think.

"Must be talking to an angel", Annie Lennox said. With this song in my mind, this novel begins and ends. Hence its name. The marble angel is a contradiction in terms: its clear, opaque, and cold material, heavy, invariably static, never more inanimate, is the absolute opposite of what an angel is in Judeo-Christian mythology. Nothing lighter, nothing warmer, clearer and translucent, ethereal, eternally mobile and animated. And this paradox, I believe, is the deep heart of this novel, which is not only the encounter - like with the figure of the angel - of reality and fiction, but also of the material and the immaterial, of life and death, of the self and the others, of the terrestrial and the ethereal, of the flesh and the spirit, of the mind and the body, of love and lovelessness (a little more of the second), and of the paradoxes of the human. Although perhaps we see more the meannesses than the virtues within the family universe that is presented to us.

The Gant Pentland. An American family in the early 20th century, in which stinginess seems to be a birthmark. Parents, Eliza and Gant, completely far from the loving and caring model that is part of the stereotype of the model family. They are selfish, greedy, and negligent. But it is not a poor family, quite the contrary, although they make their children go through hardships in an automatic and unconscious movement of self-pity and self-complacency. The children, Steve, Ben, Daysi, Helen, Luke, and Eugene, some more portrayed than others, end up moving to the rhythm of the chaos and order of the family. Some with more luck than others, but none with a full life. All seem to be trapped in that tangled web that can be the family and blood. And here we have Eugene, the youngest, born in the 20th century, neglected since birth, run over by a horse-drawn cart when he carelessly crawled out onto the street. Wanting to escape since birth... Eugene, brilliant in his studies, intellectual, an erudite child, the alter ego of Thomas Wolfe, is the protagonist of this novel, through whom life passes as if an animated marble angel were whispering something to him...

This is a novel that was novel and innovative for its time, including several genres, styles, motifs, and thematic axes. The narration of some passages recalls the technique of interior consciousness in the style of Joyce and sometimes also the observation of the exterior from the interior consciousness of the character, in the style of Faulkner, who declared that Wolfe was the best American writer of his time. Within that use of the interior monologue, there are very subtle and masterful changes of narrator (from the third to the first person). Regarding the theme, we have a family saga on the one hand and a bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) on the other. A novel that is in some parts a naturalistic and风俗画的 one, although in general, it can be framed in the North American Southern lyrical realism, but it is also at the same time an autofiction (based on Wolfe and his family) and an existentialist novel.

Eugene is a character who goes in search of himself, outside the conditioning of his blood, of his family. He is the Other, he antagonizes with them. Nevertheless, it is very decisive that at the funeral of Ben, his brother, Eugene recognizes that he is also one of THEM, that he has everything of his family within him, and that the only one who was truly different was Ben and had to die, perhaps to escape. But this, perhaps, is what he sees at that moment of early youth as a prison from which he tries to escape. I observe a rather metaphorical intention of the author in the idea that there is no way to free yourself from the place where you come from. Also remarkable here is the weight placed on the family lineage, the Gantian or the Pentland, just like the Karamazovian in The Brothers Karamazov, which is presented as a genetic determinism, perhaps because of the time in which it was written, that was the mentality. Today we know that every genetic trait also depends on the environment, it is not a determinant. The idea of not being able to free oneself from the place where one comes from is also seen in the final chapter. Is Eugene delirious? Is he crazy or just an eccentric? Or perhaps madness as a metaphor for going against the norms of society is the only way to free oneself from the condemnation of the weight of blood.

On the other hand, all the observation that he makes of American society is interesting. For example, in one part he points out that the American doesn't care what ideology or political party governs them, as long as they have well-being and economic prosperity. Here something crucial that he also addresses when he narrates the school and college adventure of Eugene is that in the United States, education is liberal and humanistic, but when they enter the labor market, everything is capital. Somewhere I read that this was ironic because university students are prepared in an intellectual and artistic sensibility that they never apply again, because everything else is business, money, ultra-capitalism. And Eliza herself, the mother, is a metaphor of this. The woman is more worried about real estate speculation and making money than about her own children. She even believes that all diseases are "imaginary" although she sees her own son dying. The characters are metaphors of American society, but they are also metaphors of themselves, that is, of human beings. The low passions, the dark feelings, greed, avarice, meanness, selfishness, envy, lack of solidarity are explored. All that which people and families hide under the rug but is there.

And then there are all the existential and philosophical questions of Eugene, again the theme of the existence of God, social conventions, and the good and evil that underlies everything. And also the Self, the great Self, the construction of the person, who debates between a feeling of misery and grandiosity, the self-amazement of Eugene, the excessive and delirious ego (in one part where he declares himself the god of everything, the savior of humanity, the greatest of men), but who at the same time, like the rest of Americans (he says in the book) was incapable of any rebellion that would disrupt the social order. All that which boils within him does not come out of his self-absorption. It is immanence that seeks transcendence and does not know how to achieve it... And since it is a character based on himself (on the author), we already know that he achieved transcendence. This novel simply illustrates the breaking point in his life, the beginning of the Self (once detached from his family). The great split of the person. That's why it is a bildungsroman.

Finally, I want to highlight the beauty of the final chapter with the angels taking on movement while Eugene talks to the specter? of his brother Ben, and then becoming immobile again with the dawn. It is wonderful. A small touch of magical realism to close... That scene, those of Gant the father - who is a stonemason - talking or crying to the marble angel in his workshop, and the fantastic scenes in which time is paralyzed (like in the later novel of Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir) brought to my mind the song of Annie Lennox, "There must be an angel, playing with my heart"... We will have to read the continuation of this novel, Of Time and the River. A pioneer of autofiction by Wolfe, but at another level. Highly recommended.

A mammoth story unfolds as Eugene Gant comes of age in Altamont, Catawba, which is a thinly-veiled Asheville, N.C. where Wolfe himself grew up. In particular, we witness his complex relationships with his alcoholic father, his penny-pinching amateur realtor mother, who are thinly-veiled versions of Wolfe's own parents, and his tragic brother Ben. There is some remarkable characterisation here, with inspired passages that draw the reader in. However, I believe it fails to reach the level of genius that Wolfe claimed for himself. The descriptive writing in the early sections can be rather dreadful. Wolfe seems unable to let a noun stand on its own, instead bombarding every one with adjective upon adjective. It's the kind of undisciplined flowery nonsense that any literate teenager might pen. But fortunately, both he and the book improve as the story progresses. As an autobiography of a troubled youth, it makes for a great read. However, it certainly isn't the so-called "Great American Novel." O lost.

Hemingway said about Thomas Wolfe that he can be ranked with the best that American literature has produced and called him a very life-hungry writer. And indeed he is!

Twenty years ago, I read the autobiographical novel 'Look Homeward, Angel'. Now I read this work for the first time in the Dutch translation by Sjaak Commandeur. The book reads like a train.

A passage:

"O, unexpected, intangible faun, lost in the thicket of myself, I will hunt you until you stop visiting my eyes with hunger. I have heard your footsteps in the desert, I have seen your shadow in ancient buried cities, I have heard your laughter roll through a million streets, but I have not found you there. There is no leaf hanging for me in the forest; I will not light a stone on the hills; I will not find a door in any city. But in the city that I myself am, on the continent of my soul, I will find the lost language, the lost world, a door through which I can enter and music as strange as has ever rung; I will pursue you, spirit, along the labyrinthine paths until - until? O, Ben, my spirit, an answer?"

How beautiful this language is! Wolfe's magnum opus is overwhelming and in the Dutch translation it is at least as impressive.

Thomas Wolfe, an American writer, passed away in 1938 at the young age of 37. At that time, only two of his novels had been published: Look Homeward, Angel (translated into Dutch by Sjaak Commandeur as Daal neder, engel) and Of Time and the River. Although Wolfe left a profound impression on American literature despite his short life, I was initially unfamiliar with his work and mainly compared it to that of his contemporary John Steinbeck. Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath also begins in a remote area in the southern United States. However, the similarity ends there: Daal neder, engel is primarily an autobiographical coming-of-age story.
Wolfe describes the life of Eugene, the son of the impetuous Oliver Gant and the thrifty Eliza Pentland. The boy grows up in the fictional place of Altamont, modelled after Asheville in North Carolina where the writer himself grew up. In sharp contrast to his rough environment – the years of colonisation and the Civil War are still strongly felt – Eugene is a dreamer. The boy is mainly interested in literature and poetry and takes refuge in classical myths and the work of Shakespeare, until he can no longer escape from a reality full of temptations and worries.
Wolfe sometimes stamps his work with a heavy and sardonic mark. However, this mark does not correspond one-to-one with the story he tells, which leaves room for hope and change. The Civil War is in the past, and the 20th century is beginning. Even the outbreak of the First World War is an opportunity for poor Americans to find happiness: good salaries are set aside for them too. Moreover, there is always Eugene's kind, sometimes naïve gaze that pursues the American dream in his own way. One drawback of this beautiful time picture is its size: the work is sometimes a bit long-winded.

"Looking for Lost Time" with little wheels. What I mean by this is that if someone is very intimidated by the classic French novel, they can start with "The Angel's View", which is more accessible (in terms of length, but probably also in style). This novel also talks about memory, although in this case Wolfe does not have the intention of preserving a society or a social group in amber, but rather of talking about the passage to adulthood of a boy and his crazy, crazy family.

It must be taken into account that we are talking about white people in the southern United States in the early 20th century, with all that implies in terms of implicit racism and anti-Semitism from which the protagonist cannot completely escape. But the novel itself is so focused on the experiences of the protagonist and his family that everything else is in the background. It is there, and sometimes it is more obvious, but it is like how a white family of that social class lived at that time.

The language is often poetic, although sometimes it borders on sentimentality, but I understand it, because Eugene, the protagonist, is a boy who takes everything very much to heart.

The novel has no defined plot, the author inundates you with words, practically nothing happens (except life), the characters are sometimes hateful (as only human beings can be) and yet I was never bored. It was difficult for me to read it because it is dense, whether you like it or not, but I did not find it tedious. In the end, Eugene's family is a bit like yours, and in the end, you feel like him that need to get away, even if they are the only thing he has.

I will not say that it is a novel for all audiences, but if you like stories about families, you can give it a try.

I have often regarded Wolfe's books as surrealistic. His ideas seem to be thrown back at him in a necessary reflection of apparently meaningless things. However, these things, by the very necessity of being so integral to one's being, end up becoming important. I can vividly remember that as an adolescent, upon seeing the title of this book, I thought it must surely be something maudlin and childish. It seemed like a kind of reminiscence that dwelled only in the happy minds of those who dream without having nightmares. For years, I had no desire to have anything to do with it. But then, the question arises: how did Wolfe manage to make poignancy important to me and, I should think, to everyone else?

In one sense, the characters are stark, almost like black and white images of people. They are striving in their own unique ways to become real people, to fulfill their dreams, and to completely submit to the wanderlust within them. Wolfe doesn't so much actively invite you inside the story as he simply leaves the door open a crack. At this point, you, as the reader, find yourself forced to push yourself inside the story. You become happy to be just a mere spot on his mother's kitchen wall. Soon enough, you are looking around in a six-dimensional carnival of values that is painted on a canvas of hopes and broken dreams. Each character is doing penitence in his own way.

The worst moment comes about when you realize that what you so eagerly wanted to join was actually a kind of reexamination of oneself. Understanding Wolfe, especially this wonderful book, is a lifelong effort of seeing one's faults in the mirror and then deciding which direction to take with each and every one of them.

This was a reachback read, a journey back in time to a book that was read 40 years ago.

As I picked up the book again, it felt like starting anew. The 40 years of hard living that had passed since then had given me a new perspective.

And let me tell you, it definitely did. The experiences, the hardships, and the growth had all shaped my understanding of the story in ways I could never have imagined before.

I would毫不犹豫地 shelve this book next to "Auggie March" in the bildungsroman literature. It is a classic that explores the coming-of-age journey with depth and authenticity.

Reading it again after all these years was a reminder of the power of literature to touch our lives and change our perspectives.

It made me appreciate the value of revisiting old favorites and seeing them with fresh eyes.

Overall, it was a rewarding and enlightening experience that I will cherish for a long time to come.

UNCLE.

I have managed to make it halfway through this book. It is so monotonous and rambling, lacking any plot or purpose. I truly cannot fathom how people could have ever found enjoyment in this. I reached what I assume is the titular angel, and then endured six paragraphs of overly detailed and mind-numbing descriptions about Carrera marble. Please, just make it end. It is page after page of exaggerated and flowery prose, stuffed with an excessive number of words.

I can accept that there are people out there who respect this work. It is like an endurance test. However, I find it hard to believe that there are people who actually enjoyed reading it in the moment. It seems more likely that any enjoyment comes only from the sense of having overcome the challenge.

Perhaps I am missing something, but this book has been a struggle to get through. I hope that the second half offers something more engaging and worthwhile.

This novel marked my initial encounter with Thomas Wolfe, and what truly astonished me was its remarkable lyricism.

His writing style seamlessly transitions from a plot-driven narrative to a song-like chanting and back again, creating an experience rather than just a story.

At times, it can be a bit of a challenge to keep up with his active mind, but the torrent of words sweeps you along like a river, leaving you entranced.

The story revolves around the epic saga of the Gants, a Southern family. With numerous members, Wolfe vividly portrays their diverse personalities and destinies in a clear and captivating way.

Simultaneously, he delves into the family dynamics, demonstrating how each member is influenced by the actions and emotions of the others.

It is evident that Wolfe has the greatest empathy for the youngest son, Eugene. As the dreamer of the family, Eugene grapples between the allure of higher learning and his ties to his ordinary, money-grubbing siblings.

Although I'm not well-versed in Wolfe's life story and can't determine if this character reflects his personal experiences, the passion underlying Eugene's moods suggests a profound authenticity.

One of the recurring motifs in Eugene's life is his persistent sense of shame. He feels ashamed of himself, his family, and even of feeling ashamed. This emotion defines his existence.

Shame is one of the most excruciating emotions to explore, and reading Wolfe's description of it was both disturbing and cathartic.

The book lost my interest somewhat in the middle when Eugene departs for college at the age of 16. Without the context of the Gant family, he appears as a confused and mopey teenager.

However, in the final act, when Eugene returns home for the death of a family member, the book reaches new heights. Wolfe presents one of the most haunting and vivid accounts of death I've ever read, which chilled me to the core.

The death scene sets the stage for the novel to conclude on a powerful note as the rest of the family recovers and resumes their inevitable paths.

Wolfe achieves one of my favorite literary feats by transforming an unremarkable, low-class family's struggles, failures, and dreams into a Greek tragedy of epic proportions.

This is a clogged toilet of verbal diarrhea.

One of the great aspects of book groups is that they introduce you to excellent books that you might not otherwise read. However, this particular instance showcases a huge downside.

Whoever had the audacity to claim that Wolfe is "on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor" should be pursued and hanged by any descendants of those esteemed authors.

This is simply a horribly edited collection. I can only imagine that any editor of taste, who was paid to handle this overwrought tripe, probably got drunk and threw the manuscript into the fireplace, hoping at least to gain some heat from it.

The awkward phrasing used to describe extremely unlikeable characters makes this a truly unappealing read. These characters seem to deserve a visit from a serial killer.

Strangely, some of the phrases that were actually edited out have been included, and perhaps they deserved inclusion more than anything that was ultimately left in. Maybe the publisher didn't understand what the editor was attempting to convey, or perhaps the editors had been driven insane by the text and were behaving in strange ways.

Since the blurb on the back states that Wolfe claimed this was "a book made out of my life," he must have been a truly miserable person growing up in a family that made the Snopes clan seem like pillars of society.

The University of North Carolina and Harvard should be ashamed to have graduated this clown with a degree.

I'm glad I borrowed this from the library because I would have burned my copy rather than take it to Half Priced Books, where it could potentially cause harm to someone else.

I'm writing this not only as a cautionary tale to avoid reading it, even as an exercise to discover just how bad a book can be, but also as a catharsis to come to terms with the time wasted on it.